David: Pretty good. They kept on adding dates at the end of
the tour, so when it came time to head over to the US, I called the US embassy
in Holland where I was at the time. They told me that I needed a Visa in
Australia where I am a citizen. The tour itself was good. I did about thirty
shows, some of them in pretty crazy places.

I played on a ship in harbor in Rostock, Germany. It was a big ship that was
fitted out to be a nightclub with this pirate type of captain. I had my own
cabin. I did a show in Dresden in a bikers club, and the owner of the club was
a Pagan/occultist. So he ended up taking up on a tour of Pagan sites in
Dresden. He even took us to places where the Nazi's used to conduct
experiments. It was all pretty weird, but fun. I did a show with Hawkwind in
Rotterdam, Holland.

Jester: When can we expect to see you tour the US, and with
what project?

David: We've been talking about perhaps a Snog tour. If I
had more notice I would have done a few Black Lung dates while I was in the
country. However there just wasn't enough time to prepare. It's a possibility.
The black Lung shows are generally easier to do because it is just me and a who
bunch of machines. It can be very spontaneous and I can do whatever I want with
that type of show. It can be really noisy, dancey, or weird depending on my
mood. With the Snog stuff it is harder to tour because there are more people
involved. We've done a lot of tours in Australia and there tends to be about
eight people all cramped in a van. It's like being married to seven other
people for five or six weeks, which is kind of tough.

Jester: Is the tour becoming more of a possibility now that
you have solid music contacts via Metropolis?

David: We've had records out here before but the record
companies have always been real incompetent. I'm trying to fix that up because
I feel there has always been a great deal of potential for Snog in the US and
it has never been realized. We've had a few tracks which have been rather
popular in clubs here but the record companies have never followed up on those
successes properly.

Jester: So the majority of your releases should become
easier to find in the US in the coming months?

David: I most certainly hope so.

Jester: Why do you have so many varied musical projects
with Black Lung, Snog & Soma?

David: They all just do different things. Early on we used
to mix the tracks up a bit more. In Australia the first couple of Snog singles
were very long because there is no legal limit to CD singles there. The single
would be at the beginning, then a few remixes, and finally some really weird
atmospheric and noise tracks at the end. I really thought some of those tracks
at the end of those singles were pretty good, yet they did tend to get less
attention in the greater scheme of things.

So when we tried to release those records as CD singles in Germany we
couldn't because by law CD singles can only be 21 minutes long. Instead of
ditching the material at the end, the record label wanted to release those
tracks as a different artist. So they ended up releasing that album as the
first Black Lung record which was meant to be "Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars".
Of course they got the title of the record wrong, changed all of the artwork without
my permission and reordered the tracks. I was pretty mad about that which is
why I am not on Machinery any longer.

The second album was a proper Black Lung album, not consisting of Snog out
takes. It was more of a concept album as well as the third album. The Soma
stuff was me and Peter from Eden & Dead Can Dance these days. That material
obviously had a different vibe to it, so we released it as a new project. So we
gave it a different name, look and feel. The music has a tendency to deal more
with magical, supernatural and paganistic topics.

Jester: What does the new Soma, "Inner Cinema" sound like
in comparison to the first album?

David: It is more soundtracky. The other day I described it
as if you were in a room with a Spaghetti western playing on one wall, an old
Italian horror film on another, and someone is playing a chip-hip record in the
middle. The first Soma album had a few dark club tracks and this album has
none. It is a total no dance floor record.

Jester: I also noticed you had release three recent Black
Lung singles as well?" "The More The Confusion... The More The Profit",
"Uncomfortable Questions For Comfortable People", and "Rhic-dom".

David: Those last two songs have only been released in
Australia. I guess I just produce a great deal of material. It is not as if I
push myself to write like that. We are full time musicians, so we are lucky to
not have to deal with day jobs.

Jester: I also noticed you had a tendency to reuse certain
phrases or concepts from project to project. For example the phrase, "The More
The Confusion... The More The Profit", was used in the Snog 'Cliche' video.

David: I enjoy using particular ideas and text which mutate
off and end up being used in other places. I am not overly careful or anal
about something like that. That particular text quote was from a book that I
was reading at the time. I really thought that quote was important and it was a
shame to only use it in a video which would not be seen by that many people. So
it ended up becoming the title of a Black Lung track and eventually a single as
well.. On the artwork of the single is the full text of the quote.

That quote comes from a document called "Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars"
which for years was something I always wanted to use in my music. That document
has been an underground text that has passed from person to person via
photocopies for years. It is one of those conspiracy documents that someone
dreamed up years ago as well as an interesting read.

It was supposedly a top secret think tank document from the late 1960's that
someone found second hand in a photocopy that they purchased from the Boeing
corporation. Supposedly, it is a study on how you can control large portions of
humanity through economics and manipulated consumeristic desires. They even
have equations on how you can control people's buying behaviors. It is really
fascinating, some people think its real, other think it is fake, but I don't
think it matters.

Jester: You seem to have a extreme fascination with
conspiracy theories most of which relate to the US. Why is that?

David: You have to admit the US is the center of world
capitolism these days. It is the largest, most powerful nation leading the way
in the world today. I am not poking criticism as the American people, but the
American system of government is pretty evil. It is about as evil as you can
get. Some people get upside when I point that out but I am not trying to be
unfair. Australia labors under the same political structure and are only
politically ten years behind America. It is not quite as draconian in
Australia, but it is close.

Many people complain that I am only railing on the US, but a lot of the
lyrics are about situations which have occurred in Australia. We have a
particularly brutal police force. In the last year they have murdered twenty
innocent people with no consequences at all. We share a common set of similar
problem with the root of it all being capitolism. Personally I feel it is a bad
system for the majority of the people. Sure for the 2% of the population who
are billionaires, the system works, but not for everyone else.

The idea that money is more important than human beings is a bad one. When you
walk down the street and you look into the faces of the common person, they
look miserable. People look like neurotic caged animals. They look just like a
dog would if you locked it in a room for a week.

Recently I read the Unabomber Manifesto and I agreed with 98% of it. The
basic premise of the manifesto is that technological society is the cause. The
manifesto says we have to destroy a technological system to survive. I don't
agree with everything it says but I do agree with most of it.

One thing the manifesto mentions is the fact that man is being shaped to fit
the machines as opposed to the other way around. I find it amazing that people
take mind shaping drugs like Prozac to escape their problems rather than
treating the cause of the problem itself. We never attack the cause, we only
ever seem to mold people in a manner so that the societal machine will always
continue. Human beings are being chemically adapted to shape this machine and
that just amazes me.

Jester: Have you ever had any type of musical training?

David: Not at all. Really, I wouldn't know one note from
another. Some of the time it is an advantage. Most of the time I can do
anything I want as long as I think it sounds right. I know classically trained
musicians it is really difficult for them to write anything that doesn't
rigidly fit into their musical models. Sometimes there are drawbacks because I
could never sit down and write a Country song with an acoustic guitar but I
would have no idea how to do something like that. On the other hand, there are
advantages because I can make crazy electronic music and as long as it sounds
right to me people don't seem to have a problem with it.

Jester: What inspired you to first compose music and
release it so that other people might listen to it as well?

David: I was always a fan of music. Right when Snog started
in late 1989, it was just a bunch of friends whom I knew in art school. At that
time I was listening to a lot of Foetus, Wiseblood, Tom Waits and Front 242. I
thought I would just give it a shot and making something similar to
those artists and see what happened. We spent a couple of years just playing
around with the music without making it a serious concern.

Then by accident I found myself in a twenty hour per day music industry
position. I never envisioned this happening at all. When I began I was in art
school being trained as a sculptor and print maker. I ended up giving that all
in favor of music away because it was quite boring. There was nothing
deliberate about it at all.

Jester: Why do you still make music today?

David: Making music and having this communication with an
audience is fun. I kind of get annoyed when people think it is stupid to try
and communicate via music because that is what I think music is here for, to
communicate. Only in the recent years have we lost that. Originally music was
just another way to talk to people and I really enjoy that type of thing. We
are just trying to communicate in a very realistic manner via our music.

With all of the music being made today, it could have been made on Mars for
all I know because it says nothing about my life at all. I have no idea what
the point of it is because I simply cannot relate to it. That is why a lot of
Snog tracks are about very mundane things like going to the supermarket. Those
tracks mirror things that everyone on the planet has done at some point in
their lives and no one but us seems to communicate in this manner.

There are areas which are a complete drag. We are totally self managed and
in the end I don't like it at all. About the time the first Snog album came out
I was working twenty hours a day. Since then I have been trying to make sure it
never happens again because it literally drove me quite nutty. That side of
things I don't like as much and I am always trying to find ways to minimize the
business side of music as much as possible. Dealing with the bitchy, jealous
people I don't enjoy either. That can be rather disillusioning at times. The
only place that really seems to happen is in Melbourne, where I live.

Jester: If you had to choose only one artists to
collaborate with in the future, who might it be?

David: If I was forced to make a decision right now, it
would probably be Lee Hazelwood. I've been on a bit of a Lee Hazelwood kick in
the past month it seems. He is the guy from the 1960's who wrote a lot of dark,
psychotic country music. A lot of his solo material is really hard to find both
at home, in Europe and in America. So probably at this exact moment, I'd
probably really like to make a record with him. I seriously doubt that it would
ever happen, but the concept of the whole thing would be great.

In all seriousness, I have been asked to do an album with Merzbow. I think I
would really enjoy working with him. The latest Black Lung has a lot of extreme
noise type tracks and it is kind of my version of Heavy Metal without any
guitars. Sort of a Death Metal without any guitars or vocals.